Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Show How Cellular Complexity Can Evolve
ananyo writes with an excerpt from a Nature news release: "By bringing long-dead proteins back to life, researchers have worked out the process by which evolution added a component to a cellular machine. ... In a paper published in Nature, researchers recreated an 'ancestral' version of a cellular machine called the V-ATPase proton pump, which channels protons across membranes and is vital for keeping cell compartments at the right acidity. Part of this machine is a ring of six proteins that threads through the membrane. Animals and most other eukaryotes have a ring composed of two types of protein component; fungi are alone in having a ring with three. The researchers used computational methods to work backwards and find the most likely sequences of these proteins hundreds of millions of years ago. The team inserted the DNA into yeast and found that just two mutations can turn the simple 2-protein ring into the more complex 3-protein ring."
inb4 anyone mentions Creationism.
That's nothing... you were even nb4 anyone claimed "first post".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
What could a creationist do with this?
Would not an intelligent designer re-use the most efficient design in all the lifeforms? Unless someone can demonstrate that the 3 ringed design is better for fungi but only for fungi; but even in that case that just shows limited random mutation combined with selection of the fittest works. I just don't get how this can be used for ignorance.
Although arguing against creationism is kind of like arguments against flat Earth...
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
So this is not about cell phone networks?
Nope, it's biology. Biology manages to make lemonade out of lemons. Cell phone networks make vinegar out of cider.
How do like them apples for a mixed metaphor?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
From the article:
"The work, published online in Nature, reveals the pathway by which the two-component ancestral protein (let’s call the components A and B) became a three-component one. The gene encoding protein A duplicated, and two identical copies of the gene started making proteins A1 and A2. Then, A1 and A2 started to accumulate mutations so that they could no longer substitute for each other in the ring."
"In this case, the more complex version doesn’t seem to work better or have any other obvious advantage compared with the simpler one; it is more likely that A1 and A2 proteins were just corrupted by random mutation. (The yeast didn’t seem worse off when they were stripped of their own three-protein ring and instead used one built of two ancestral proteins.) “What’s surprising to me is the idea that greater complexity doesn’t require acquisition of new functions. It can come from partial degeneration of the ancestor,” Thornton says."
But back to reality ...
tl;dr - you can make complex machines out of simple ones. Even with biologic 'machines'. Not something anyone who has thought about molecular evolution would find surprising, but it's nice to see some reasonable experimental evidence to show that it's real.
Thorton's lab has done some interesting work in the past. Nice to see he is getting some exposure. It does bother me a bit that Nature (the journal, not the mom) is continuing to take a very politically polarized editorial stance. They're really egging on the creationists (pun intended, I guess).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This is just an example why you can't really 'argue' with a creationist. Anything you come up with, they can make a magic-fairy-dust argument that it's because God wanted it that way.
It isn't science.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The research was published in PLoS Biology, not in Nature.
I'm fine with people saying evolution is the method, with a deity being the driving force. The issue is when they say that god created everything from nothing in six days around 6,000 years ago and any evidence to the contrary was put here by the devil to lure us away from the truth.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
"What could a creationist do with this?"
Didn't you RTFS?
It has a mention of 'hundreds of million years ago'. A good creationist begins to 'Can't year you!' at that point.
I'm fine with people saying evolution is the method, with a deity being the driving force. The issue is when they say that god created everything from nothing in six days around 6,000 years ago and any evidence to the contrary was put here by the devil to lure us away from the truth.
So, you're saying, really that the Devil is in the details?
(sorry)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Second link points to wrong paper, Nature paper is here. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10724.html
I like them a lot, because I've made them into cider.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
"The researchers used computational methods to work backwards and find the most likely sequences of these proteins hundreds of millions of years ago."
So why are we just hearing about it now?
Pat Robertson: "Science perverting resurrection is an abomination, and God's wrath will strike us most likely in the form of a random earthquake or hurricane or tornado sometime within the 12 months."
I'd add the /sarcasm tag just to show I'm just making fun of him, but I actually think my prediction of what will show up on YouTube from him next is pretty accurate.
I8-D
That's the Nature blog ... it's definitely not the part of Nature that publishes peer-reviewed articles nor is it even Nature News. I highly doubt there is much if any editorial control at that level, and think that egging on creationists (especially because it's a quote from one of the authors) at that level is fine.
This is just an example why you can't really 'argue' with a creationist. Anything you come up with, they can make a magic-fairy-dust argument that it's because God wanted it that way.
It isn't science.
And more importantly, it isn't rational.
But its just an arbitrary bar. Once you've stepped off the rational, any opinion is suspect. It doesn't matter if you pray to "god" when you're having a shitty day, believe in "intelligent design" or live in a compound having incestuous relations with 9 year old girls ... its all a matter of degree. The path of rationality is very narrow, and once you step off it, and aren't willing to step back onto it, the rest is just haggling over price, as they say.
Their "battle cry" against Evolution is "Irreducible Complexity" meaning some biological systems are so complex that if a single part is removed the system fails.
It's the equivalent of saying "if i remove the cam shaft from a vehicle it can't function, therefore GOD must have created vehicles"
(Crap car analogy but can't be arsed thinking like a "new earth Creationist")
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
I'm fine with people saying evolution is the method, with a deity being the driving force. The issue is when they say that god created everything from nothing in six days around 6,000 years ago and any evidence to the contrary was put here by the devil to lure us away from the truth.
Then your position is no more supportable or rational than the people you claim to have a problem with. Both of you are wrong. Degrees of wrong is interesting from an academic standpoint, or when you want to mock someone, but wrong is, in fact, black or white. But you're drawing a line in a non-rationally-supportable position, so you're already on the wrong side of it.
As a Christian, I have to say the biggest frustration I find is the fact that so many Christians are so insistent on 6 24 hour days when there wasn't even the concept of a modern day for the first several days. Even more direct, Jesus said he would come again "soon". I'm pretty sure that rules out the idea of our idea of time being anything like what God considers time so I have no idea why someone would insist it MUST be 6 24 hour days. Could God have made things look like they do and do it in 6 days if he's all powerful? Sure, but why would he. It doesn't make sense and there isn't anything Biblical that says that it is 6 24 hour days either.
AJ Henderson
This is just an example why you can't really 'argue' with a creationist. Anything you come up with, they can make a magic-fairy-dust argument that it's because God wanted it that way.
It isn't science.
You, too, would have lost the Scopes Monkey trial. You forget the initial premise that neither "God" nor "Science" have intrinsic value.
The V-ATPase generally has more than 6 proteins that cross the membrane. Depending on the species, it is usually more around 10-12 individual subunits that work together to form a ring for useful transport.
From a biochemical perspective, it is also worthwhile to point out that the enzyme is powered by ATP hydrolysis - hence the name V-ATPase. It is a motor, and ATP is the fuel. Without ATP you get no useful work.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
This is just an example why you can't really 'argue' with a creationist. Anything you come up with, they can make a magic-fairy-dust argument that it's because God wanted it that way.
It isn't science.
And more importantly, it isn't rational.
But its just an arbitrary bar. Once you've stepped off the rational, any opinion is suspect. It doesn't matter if you pray to "god" when you're having a shitty day, believe in "intelligent design" or live in a compound having incestuous relations with 9 year old girls ... its all a matter of degree. The path of rationality is very narrow, and once you step off it, and aren't willing to step back onto it, the rest is just haggling over price, as they say.
Of course the square root of -1 isn't rational either, but we couldn't do a lot of physics without it.
A creationist with any sense would acknowledge adaptation. Only fools refuse such inter species evolution exists.
As a creationist I beleive in the vast majority of modern science with the caveat that it was all created by Someone/thing (in my case God) with vast complexity built-in. We don't see the big picture, which is why it is important to explore these avenues of how things came to be, how they adapted and why. We don't know why the 3 ring is better for fungi, but that is the very reason why it must be explored.
Their "battle cry" against Evolution is "Irreducible Complexity" meaning some biological systems are so complex that if a single part is removed the system fails.
It's the equivalent of saying "if i remove the cam shaft from a vehicle it can't function, therefore GOD must have created vehicles"
(Crap car analogy but can't be arsed thinking like a "new earth Creationist")
No, it is not. But then again, somebody or something did create vehicles.
Nonsense. Most models are wrong. They're still enormously useful compared to something that's more wrong. Newtonian mechanics is wrong, but it was -- and still is -- very useful for the overwhelming majority of situations.
It is very wrong to say the earth is flat. There are many, many ways of demonstrating its wrongness and assuming the earth is flat will lead you to wildly incorrect conclusions for many problems.
It is less wrong to say the earth is a sphere. However, it's harder to demonstrate that it's wrong, and you can do many useful calculations assuming a sphere for simplicity.
It's also wrong, but not very much, to say the earth is a slightly squashed sphere. It requires very careful measurement to demonstrate this, and it's such an accurate approximation to make that it's rare to see someone actually model the earth's correct shape.
Here is the Nature Article mentioned in the summary - the link in the summary goes to a PLoS Biology article.
It was just published online today, I don't see any other copies available yet. However, the primary author of the paper is supported by an NIH grant, so the paper should be released in its entirety as a non-paywalled article fairly soon to comply with the NIH funding rules.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'm not sure I follow what you're saying. Is your point that it's just as rational to constantly change views of superhuman beings in order to hold on to religious beliefs (I've never seen Satan described as more than a tempter -- there's certainly no indication that God gave him such power of creation to physically affect physics, geology, biology, etc in such a way to make the universe appear much older than 6000 years old) than to accept such evidence as face value? If so, I think we have different views of rationality.
A creationist would probably argue about this being proof against macroevolution, since such increasing complexity violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The fact that the most efficient design is seen across multiple species would be turned into an argument that the Maker's mark is on all creation, and not an argument for divergent evolution.
Oh, wait. You wanted this to be a rhetorical question. The fact is, that many forms of creationism are still based on a rational mind trying to apply logic science - with the exception of allowing for supernatural intervention. And of course that alone is reason enough for many to ridicule the conclusions AND the thought process.
Don't be silly, the car evolved from horses. Everybody knows that! /me removes tongue from cheek
Not quite. You'd conclude that vehicles were created by intelligence, which would be true (for some manufacturers).
Which--as I hope you know but I feel should be pointed out for others who might read this and think it has some merit--is complete nonsense.
Second Law of Thermodynamics
The key word in the first sentence is "isolated".
This is just an example why you can't really 'argue' with a creationist. Anything you come up with, they can make a magic-fairy-dust argument that it's because God wanted it that way. It isn't science.
"Scientists" don't always follow science either. With respect to religion the pro- and anti- camps have both let personal biases interfere with the scientific process. For example leading scientists of the day dismissed the big bang theory because it "smelled like creationism". These eminent scientists were biased because the big bang theory was introduced by catholic priest.
"Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître ( lemaitre.ogg (helpinfo) 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He was the first person to propose the theory of the expansion of the Universe, widely misattributed to Edwin Hubble. He was also the first to derive what is now known as the Hubble's law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article. Lemaître also proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his 'hypothesis of the primeval atom'."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaitre.
What could a creationist do with this?
I once pointed out to a creationist that an intelligent designer probably could have done a better job with the human sinus cavity, and he attributed the problems with it to the imperfections in creation introduced after Adam and Eve's fall (that is, eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil).
Right, but it's still a baffling thought to imagine increasing orders of complexity with no intelligent input. Still baffles me.
It isn't science.
No, it isn't. It's philosophy, and it shouldn't be in a science story, but somehow the athiests on this board insist on bringing it up anyway.
Logic won't convince a a religious person that there's no god any more than you can convince me that my computer doesn't exist, but no argument can sway anyone into believing, either. The religious person has percieved his god, so he doesn't need faith to believe any more than I need faith to know that this computer is real (although I could be locked in a rubber room dreaming this nonexixtant computer up). The athiest needs faith.
The only logical position is agnosticism. It's a pointless argument, why do you guys keep insisting on the argument? It['s tedious and tiresome and I wish you'd stop. It's completely offtopic.
Free Martian Whores!
in b4 6000 year's
I try to find a short, concise rebuttal that utterly defeats that argument.
The best I've found is, "Science is about the ability to test a claim. You cannot test the claim that God did it, therefore it is irrelevant to science and as such irrelevant to my life." If anyone wants a shot at wording this more succinctly or effectively, go for it - I'd love to hear it. (I'd also love to hear any potential counterarguments).
It is an unfortunate byproduct of being an Atheist that people generally challenge my beliefs (or rather, lack thereof) and I've had to come up with a few defense mechanisms over the years.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Genesis 1 explicitly states "...and the evening and the morning were the first day" and so on for each of the 6 days. It's pretty clear, although it makes it obvious that the author was unaware of how night and day work. I think some Christians become uncomfortable about glossing over things like this as poetic license because if the Bible is something that can't be taken literally the whole thing becomes suspect.
All of the people I've spoken with that are biblical literalists have to perform bizarre mental contortions in order to continue to believe that every word of the bible is absolutely true.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Agreed, though I find the complexity and mystery that unavoidably surrounds a hypothetical creator-intelligence to be significantly more baffling.
Add in the notion that if the car can't drive 5 miles without the camshaft, we'll never get to the point of adding the radiator, and you're... closer.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
"researchers have worked out the process by which evolution added a component to a cellular machine"
No, they did not.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The athiest needs faith.
Technically, no, he does not. There are gnostic and agnostic atheists, just as there are gnostic and agnostic theists.
A gnostic atheist "knows" there is no god(s), an agnostic atheist does not believe in the existence of a god(s), but will claim they cannot know for certain.
Admitting the lack of certain knowledge -and- the lack of a belief in what are essentially unsubstantiated rumors don't require much faith in anything other than one's own powers of observation.
semantics are everything!
Exactly. Religion is not science, but so is any unverifiable theory, including theory of origin of different things.
The paper gives you an idea how things _might_ have happen.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
"I'm fine with people saying evolution is the method, with a deity being the driving force."
That is an rationally unsupportable stance.
Let me get this straight...
1)We start with a system which has a valid, functioning two-protein arrangement, and a valid, functioning three-protein arrangement. Therefore, even according to the creationists, the three-protein design is not irreducibly complex, and its "design," even according to them, proves nothing for creationism. We should have started with the two-protein ring and worked out how it was created from a one-protein design. THAT would throw them for a loop. No pun intended.
2)We engineer an "ancestral" protein using our human intelligence. All we can derive is a working protein which has only components of the two shared proteins we have - there's no way to presume that this is in any way ancestral to what we see today, because portions of the genome which have changed may have changed in only one fork, and portions which are ancestral may have been removed from, or changed in, both modern genomes.
This is akin to looking at the latest Linux mainline kernel, and the latest Android kernel, and deriving an actual copy of Linux 2.2.0. If someone can tell me how this can be done, I'm all ears, because it would eliminate the need for source control and diffs and make my job much easier. In reality, all we've done is engineered a third, artificial, sequence which has the desired functionality. Is it ancestral? No, we just made it up, and have no idea if it reflects a previous version of the genes any more than we can recreate Linux 2.2.0 without anything but two forks of the newest kernel version.
3) To make this hypothetical protein, we use a custom-built lab, and computational methods.
4) We determine which "ancestral" (hypothetical) sequences are valid by only selecting for those which work, by intelligently determining which work and which don't.
5) We define a pathway by which this ancestral genome could have forked into what we see, and work out a way to make that happen.
6) We then engineer the mutations to make our predicted path to mutation happen, from our intelligent study of genetics.
7) We observe no evolutionary advantage from the new, mutation-engineered protein over the engineered hypothetical ancestral protein. Therefore, were it to arise in the wild, it would not have been actively preserved by natural selection, yet the real three-protein ring has been preserved. If the two-protein system evolved in fungi to the three-protein system, then at some point there were two-protein fungi and three-protein fungi. There are no two-protein fungi any longer, which means that the three-protein ring produced an evolutionary advantage, which preserved its hosts while the two-protein-ring-containing fungi were all eliminated. This should be a red flag that there's a problem with our hypothetical ancestral reconstruction.
So basically, we created an artificial system, call it ancestral, and work out a way to engineer it to become the system which we see today. We use intelligent design (by humans) to disprove intelligent design (by a god).
Guys, I'm all for disproving these wackos, but if we're going to do it we're going to have to do better than setting up a house of straw which someone who doesn't even agree with them can knock down with five minutes of thought. This is really just making us all look stupid. The fact that Nature would publish it and say it is evidence against the creationists, in any medium, and stand by its claims just makes me a bit sad for the kinds of straws we'll grasp at to try and shut these guys up. Aren't we supposed to be the ones with the critical thinking and rationality?
The issue is when they say that god created everything from nothing in six days around 6,000 years ago
What I think is hilarious is that I've never, not once, heard anyone actually say that "six days" was exact (and in the original Hebrew "period of time" is translated to "day" in the modern texts) and nothing existed more than 6000 years ago -- except at slashdot.
Free Martian Whores!
This is just an example why you can't really 'argue' with a creationist. Anything you come up with, they can make a magic-fairy-dust argument that it's because God wanted it that way.
It isn't science.
Strawman. Educate yourself:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04475a.htm
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05654a.htm
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05655a.htm
Some say the earth is flat. Others say the earth is around and those two groups are against each other.
Why don't you all play along and see that the earth is both flat AND round. Just like a pizza.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Have you never come across the game of life:
http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/
or the mandelbrot set: from very simple rules you can get some remarkably complex behaviour.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
We need to have a nice sit down talk with all the folks involved. Sort of explain the basic rules for playing the game. The guys on the left. What you do is not science. It has no basis in science. Its belief... faith... it needs no foundation in science, because its about your mythos and the stories you tell about the creator. You absolutely have a right to that, and in this country the freedom to celebrated and express that faith any way you see fit, save acts that harm or risk harm to others. Stop trying to crib you faith into some psuedo-scientific theoretical framework. When you try to force facts to fit theory, you end up with something contrary to the very nature of science and anyway, its klugie, smells like feet and you've gone and dressed it funny.
You, yes, all y'all on the right. Stop poking at the folks on the left. They aren't stupid. They are practicing a perfectly natural human behavior and if it doesn't pass the muster of your process for validating truth and reality, tough, it isn't meant to, they have the right engage in magical thinking, and in some very interesting conversations, may well have things to say a human beings and metaphysics that will take the scientists among us a very long time to determine one way or the other. I mean its nonsense to mess with intangibles that way, would you try to quantify the elements of your healthy emotional life? There are parts of the human experience and behavior that are illogical, and presuppose completely unprovable assertions. Trying to logic your way through them will only irritate the natives and undermine your ability to communicate or demonstrate the amazing power of your rigorous intellectual process for determining reality when the general populace will some day most need that bright thinking.
Please, play nice and stop trying to break each others toys. Its irritating. I know some of you get your hackles up when you see Cavemen riding on the backs of Apatosaurs at the Christian Museum in Kansas City (a la Flintstones.) It wasn't so long ago you believed in St. Nick. Stop trying to screw up the others kids Christmas morning, its not your place. Maybe some day soon, somebody will squish something big at the LHC and what quirts out displays a message that says "Jesus is here too!", until then, cut each other a little slack and try to enjoy the toys you have.
Let's say a "day" is the time it takes for the earth to rotate 360 degrees. (Interesting all by itself since such a concrete measurement was unavailable before the earth was created, but whatever.) And then let's say that it took 6 such days for God to create a proto-earth, i.e., the earth the way it was 3.5 billion years ago or whatever.
And then let's say, at the end of day 6, God popped this proto-earth into his cosmic-sized Time Accelerator Machine, closed the lid, programmed the machine such that the relativity factor inside the box yields a 3.5-billion year speedup, set the timer for 1 "day", and then kicked back and cracked open a cold one, or the godly equivalent of a cold one, His work being done.
"Crude and slow, clansman. Your attack was no better than that of a clumsy child."
Just quote the verse that states (paraphrased): to God, a 1,000 years is but a day, and a day is a 1,000 years. Aka, God exists outside of time. That supports my believe that such a Creator would exist in some other dimension, and can view the 4th dimension (and perhaps travel) the same way we do in 3.
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
"Irreducible Complexity" does no really apply to all cellular organisms, the human cell has many redundant systems in place, there is for example not a single cancer regulating system, there are many (more than 1 at least) pathways to activate celular apoptosis, cancer tends to occour when several of those systems are affected.
Yeah, this also makes it far more clear how the concepts of eternity or God being all knowing could make sense. If you could see time as we see things in three dimensions, then it becomes trivial to see the "future". A lot of the Bible makes far more sense if you assume that God isn't bound by time. (And really, I don't think it is much of an assumption to make.)
AJ Henderson
So, anything which is untestable given the current state of technology is inherently irrelevant to your life?
I'll give the folks at CERN a call and tell them to stop looking for the Higgs boson. Since we can't test for it successfully right at this moment, any claims about it are irrelevant.
Next week, we might be able to successfully prove of disprove it, but its irrelevant because its untestable now, so we should just stop trying.
This kind of thing needs to be said more often. I often feel when reading scientific criticism of religion, or religious criticism of science, that I can see where both sides are coming from and what they fail to grasp (or acknowledge) about the other side. You pretty much nailed it.
the camps are split by 4 words
In The Beginning ? (GOD|BANG)
You can't say that SOMEONE didn't create everything since you can't prove that a Supreme Someone does not exist.
AIG and ICR are 2 sites that gather the details of things that should make Macro-Evolutionists go Oh Really?? (simple stuff that is not simple and problems with dating and the order of fossils are 2 examples)
did you know that there are Fossils with BioMatter included??
also the non-wackadoodle Creationists attribute The Great Flood with making most of the fossils.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
and in the original Hebrew "period of time" is translated to "day" in the modern texts
The term used in the creation story (Genesis), Yom, is the Hebrew word for day. Translating it as "day" is perfectly accurate.
Is it functionally different than the "Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?" argument? Is that rationally unsupportable?
Yeah, but the actual Greek words aren't so clear. The word for day also can translate as age. The word for morning can translate as soon or dawn and the word for evening can translate as twilight. Roughly they mean start and stop to an age. It's still a somewhat poetic read, sure, but Jesus himself spoke in parables that clearly were not literal events.
And don't get me wrong, personally, I still am fairly convinced that the Biblical creation story can be accurate as recorded, but I don't think that evening and morning have the same meaning prior to the existence of conventional evenings and mornings. It really doesn't fail to match up with our current understanding of how we think things happened, particularly if you consider it as a poetic recording of a vision given to whoever actually wrote it down (since obviously they weren't there themselves at the time).
I don't actually run in to a problem with taking everything as actual historical description until Noah, which I have trouble explaining the resultant movement of land masses and the rising of mountains necessary to have had it be possible to flood the entire Earth within what would appear to have to be the geologic time scale. Continental drift presents a far larger problem to solve than the big bang theory or evolution ever dreamed of presenting, but it unfortunately gets overlooked and has almost no discussion in any circles I've come across.
AJ Henderson
Greek? Genesis was written in Hebrew. The word often translated as "day" is yom, which is indeed pretty vague.
Evolution does not *necessarily* imply an increase in complexity.
If complexity is expensive and is not providing an advantage to the organism, the mechanism in question may mutate "back" to a state that an ancestor of that organism already expressed/had. But you're still "evolving" because you're better able to compete *now*.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Let's say...
Let's say a giant bird had indigestion and threw up a planet-sized rock from it's gizzard! It then took a crap on the planet, making it ready for life. The bird took a seed from a neighboring planet and dropped it in its own dung and then flapped it's wings causing a tachyon inversion that sped up time 1,000,000,000-fold and caused the plant to evolve into the plants, creatures, and people we know today.
Wow! Anyone can play this game and this "theory" sounds just as likely!
That is all.
Hey, you say don't want this debate, and then you bring in this like you're just asking for one:
Atheism means that you don't have a belief in a god. It doesn't mean anything more, it doesn't mean that you "believe a god doesn't exist".
Faith means that you believe in something without any evidence. Most religious people even say that they have faith, it's an important part of some religions that you believe even though God doesn't physically reveal himself to you, and you very often hear the word bandied about in churches. Atheism doesn't require this, per the earlier definition.
Agnosticism means that you don't claim knowledge of god's existence or non-existence, or ("strong" agnosticism, a later creation) that you think this knowledge is impossible to determine. You can be an agnostic theist (I believe in God, but I don't know if He exists), but that's not necessarily a rational or logically-consistent position.
This is a great (and very short) essay by Asimov on that very subject:
http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Relativity_of_Wrong
With the first link, the chain is forged.
"Science is about the ability to test a claim. You cannot test the claim that God did it, therefore it is irrelevant to science and as such irrelevant to my life."
I think your statement is clear and concise and I support everything except the last part "and as such irrelevant to my life". I hold a great respect for science and what it can teach us about the world. However, your statement precludes anything outside science (ie: religion) having any relevance to your life.
That may work for you. I would however propose that the following statement is just as valid as yours above:
"Religion is about having faith in something transcendent to one's self. Science cannot prove or disprove God exists, therefore it is irrelevant to religion."
Science and religion look at two completely separate things. Neither has anything to say that informs the other. One is the careful examination of the physical world, the other involves a choice to believe in something metaphysical. Any attempt by either side to bridge that gap and "win" the argument is a foolish mix of ignorance and arrogance that I find incomprehensible.
Except scientists aren't usually trying to invade churches.
This is quite commonplace for "the other side".
It's hard to achieve "peaceful coexistence" with Ghengis Khan. Temujin just won't let you.
They like to play the victim but they aren't really.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Except it doesn't just mean day. It can also mean epoch. It's not quite that cut and dried. It's not like "day".
The Darmok problem occurs far more often than not.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Then I'd love to trade lives with you. That's exactly the religious mindset I was inundated with growing up, and it's what my sister's teaching her kids.
Matthew chapter 16: "Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom."
So you've been contradicted by Jesus as reported via Mathew.
> So, anything which is untestable given the current state of technology is inherently irrelevant to your life?
I will up the ante.
It doesn't matter if each and every scientific "truth" is contradicted tomorrow. It simply doesn't matter.
Science does not exist to give you some sort of warm fuzzy or a sense of continuity.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
increasing complexity violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Lets start with a simple block of ice. The sun shines on it, melting it into chaotic water which flows into the ocean. The sun shines on the ocean evaporating the water into even more highly random water vapor. In the winter the water vapor cools in a cloud, and falls as highly ordered and complex snowflakes.
You are completely misapplying the 2nd law of thermo. It does not prohibit things from becoming more complex or more ordered. In fact, as noted above with snowflakes, when there is an energy flow it is normal and common for order and complexity to spontaneously arise.
When the sun shines on the water, when the sun shines on the earth in general, that sunlight is a source of flowing energy, and that energy can and does do work. It can and does do work forming order and complexity within the system.
The second law of thermo is not violated because the second law says that on average disorder increases, and under the second law the sun is burning a gigantic amount of energy and experiencing a vast increase in entropy. It is normal and permitted to have a small and continual increase in order in one place (the earth) along with a large and continual increase in entropy in the sun. The sun pays for the energy and work needed to continually increase order and complexity on the earth.
a baffling thought to imagine increasing orders of complexity with no intelligent input. Still baffles me.
One key is that there is energy input. Energy can do work.
The other key is that selectively deletion is all it takes to convert random noise into directed information.
If you flip two hundred coins, all it takes is selectively killing off the one hundred tails to end up with perfectly directed perfectly ordered one hundred heads.
Lets say we have a hundred dice all with 2's on top. We put in energy and they reproduce to 200 dice. Normally they reproduce keeping the same number on top. But lets say there's a 10% chance that each "child" die is born flipped one-number-lower. And lets say there's a one-in-a-million chance for each "child" die to be born flipped one-number-higher. So basically we have 180 dice born with 2's, and 20 dice born with 1's. Now we kill off half the dice, starting with the weakest (lowest number). So we wind up with 100 dice all with 2's again. We keep doing that for many generations, many dice mutate to lower numbers and get selectively killed off, and eventually one die will be born with a 3 on top. The 3 survives and multiplies while the 1's and 2's start getting killed off. Pretty soon you have a hundred 3's. As they reproduce you get lots of mutants with 2's, and they are all selectively killed off. Eventually a 4 is born, survives and multiplies. The 3's start ding off. Then a 5 is born, and eventually a 6 is born.
Even though there's a huge 10% chance of a random bad mutation, and a tiny one-in-a-million chance of a random good mutation, all it takes is reproduction + natural selective death to convert that randomness into perfectly a directed continual increase. There is a 100% chance that you will eventually turn a population of all 2's into a population of all 6's.
Now lets get to a powerful illustration of how "zero information" mutations can almost magically create useful new information and valuable increases in complexity.
Lets consider an animal that has black-and-white vision, such as dogs. They have a gene for the eye protein that detects light. A mutation to that gene with typically destroy the ability to detect light, it will render the animal blind. Any time that happens we can assume the animal will die out, so we can just ignore that case. However some mutations will only make a very minor change to the vision protein - some mutations will merely re-turn the protein to detect a different frequency of light. The animal would still see in black-and-white, b
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Hell, I'm still looking for a better Eve. Look at their problems, two chesticles that have a tendency to get cancer, a plumbing system that is in constant need of vigilance. And if that's an easy way to give birth, try pulling your upper lip over your head (Carol Burnett's response to an audience member asking her what giving birth is like).
It's not an argument if it's meant to be an open philosophical discussion, especially if creationism is being portrayed as some sort of quasi science.
It's all good until religiously motivated busy bodies try to distort public policy.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
As the story goes, Jesus was gone for three days, came back, and there were still people standing there who had not died. How is this such a problem for people?
I never said I agree with their stance, just that it at least is not in denial of what our senses tell us.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
And one of them was even dead (Judas Iscariot).
AJ Henderson
I thought that was Bill Cosby.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
The only logical position is agnosticism.
I disagree.
The world is full of religions, none of which can offer any better supporting evidence than any of the others. Therefore the only logical positions are to set a low standard of evidence and accept them all, or set a high standard of evidence and reject them all.
However, most of them make claims that contradict the others, so accepting them all isn't logical unless you're willing to accept that reality is inherently contradictory.
Ergo, the only logical position is to reject them all... sometimes known as atheism.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Right, but it's still a baffling thought to imagine increasing orders of complexity with no intelligent input. Still baffles me.
Why?
What is the link between complexity and intelligence?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I should rephrase that last bit. Rather, it's not relevant to my day-to-day life.
Philosophical ventures aside, whether or not God exists doesn't affect what video card I purchase or whether I end up going for a walk in the park or just down the block.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
We make complex things. We are intelligent (to varying degrees). Our own ego says that nature can't do better than us by blind guessing.
I disagree. Genesis 2 states that after 6 days of work God rested on the 7th day and sanctified it. That pretty clearly indicates that we're talking about actual days.
I think of the creation story as written from a naive perspective that was plausible at the time but is not very believable with current scientific knowledge. The flood is baldly impossible, probably based on verbal tales of a large regional flood that was exaggerated over time. People then didn't understand how large the world was, or even the shape. I've heard it discussed numerous times as one of the more problematic areas of scripture.
Man, you really need that seminar!
We make complex things. We are intelligent (to varying degrees). Our own ego says that nature can't do better than us by blind guessing.
We also make simple things. In fact, we deem simplicity as one of the hallmarks of good design.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I'm fine with people saying evolution is the method, with a deity being the driving force.
I've never found that position to be compatible with the evidence, either. Here is why: If God is the driving force behind evolution, then why can humans control evolution in the laboratory? Anyone who has had a college genetics course has probably done the experiment where you force E. Coli to develop ampicillin resistance, for example. If an E. Coli culture is placed under a UV light for a limited amount of time, samples from the UV-exposed culture will be found to have the ability to grow on ampicillin-amended media, while samples from a control culture will not (or, at least, there will be fewer colonies arising from the control -- the function of the UV light is to speed mutations; they will occur at lower rate naturally).
The point is, simply placing mutating bacteria in a given environment can lead to it adapting to that environment. If a UV photon strikes the bacteria's DNA in the right spot to activate the ampicillin-resistance gene (and the mutation goes un-repaired), it becomes ampicillin resistant; otherwise, it doesn't. The mutations are random when a single bacterium is considered, but the bulk result is always the same. What role is there for God in that? Was God controlling our choice to attempt to grow the bacteria on ampicillin amended media? Does God always step in and force the ampicllin-resistance mutation to occur just to trick us into thinking it was natural (or is Satan doing that part)?
That example is a microcosm of how all evolution occurs -- for God to be involved he would have to be either directly controlling the environment or directly controlling the mutations. All evidence that I know of appears to show he isn't guiding the mutations (unless he is trying to trick us), so that leaves the environment. In that case, the "deity drives evolution" argument would either have to be limited to events where humans are not involved or God would have to usurp our free will.
God controlling the environment to achieve a certain evolutionary end while still being consistent with current evidence seems to be problematic, too (even when humans aren't involved). God could have set the initial conditions of the universe in such a way that life would arise in environments that would push it toward the development of humans, but that would either require a deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics or God personally manipulating random quantum processes in a deceptive manner, just like with the ampicillin-resistance mutations mentioned above. That again seems improbable, for the same reason as with the mutations -- quantum processes are random in isolation, but give consistent results when considered in bulk.
I've wondered about this ever since I had my college genetics lab -- if anyone can knock down this argument I'd be interested in hearing it.
they have the right engage in magical thinking
And others have the right to try and dispel that magical thinking. If people want to go around preaching that crap, I find it completely justified to counter it.
What's really ridiculous is taking these mythologies seriously at all, and then arguing over the meaning of a particular word that was written down thousands of years ago by some storyteller, who got it from some other storyteller, and so on.
And doing this while claiming that it's religious truth, but all the other origin stories from around the globe and throughout history are false. I guess it was just too much trouble for God to get the same story to all people for all of history. Or maybe it was just more fun to do it in Game of Thrones fashion.
And where do you put yourself in this scheme?
What we see is a common property of humanity; the constant attempt to establish a pecking order, with oneself at top and others below. The reason there isn't a dialog is not because the two sides are incomprehensible to each other. It is because the two sides simply reject the other.
I've known a lot of people for whom the facts they accept are just a convenient club with which to beat others. This happens in other human pursuits, too: some people use the law cynically, to get their way, rather than heal injury or achieve justice or even keep the law. People do that in religion, and they do it in science.
Most of the people in the debate between evolution and Creationism are not arguing purely out of intellectual interest in their position. Just by reading your post, I can tell that you don't know much about Creationism, and that implies to me that you might not know more than some buzz words and debate points regarding evolution. The fact that "Nature" stoops to encouraging this sort of behavior simply demonstrates the surely nature of a lot of evolutionists.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
"The result, they say, is a challenge to proponents of intelligent design who maintain that complex biological systems can only have been created by a divine force."
Oh, come on! You aren't even trying to be honest at this point! No one who can access the Internet has any excuse to give such a sloppy definition of Intelligent Design.
OK, say it with me: "Irreducible Complexity." Do you understand the words coming out of my keyboard? Apparently not! The term is IC, not just C. Even though some evolutionists deny that any complex system is irreducibly complex, that is not justification for distorting the ID position.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
Whoever said God was the only one capable of controlling evolution? Humans have been doing it for thousands of years, ever since we started breeding animals and plants. All you've proven is that evolution can be guided, especially if you control the starting conditions.
Well, that sounds like a reuse pattern to me rather than evolution.
Yeah, my bad, thanks for the correction. I wasn't thinking straight when I was looking at that today.
AJ Henderson
It states a word that is frequently translated as age. It isn't clearly 24 hour day at all. You can't even argue that having it be 7 days makes it obvious as our week isn't based on any type of natural cycle. It's simply chosen because it matches up with the number of ages in creation. I wouldn't bet money that it isn't literal days, but I wouldn't bet money that it was either since the terms are anything but concrete.
As for the shape of the planet, there are several accounts in the Bible that only make sense given a round Earth. Also, if the planet was relatively flat (prior to plate tectonics driving up mountains, flooding the entire thing would not be unreasonably possible. The problem is that the time scale would seem to have to be much longer for that much movement of continental plates to occur.
AJ Henderson
The guy who wrote it never thought anyone would take it seriously!
Perhaps my post placed too much emphasis on our control. The problem is not so much that we can guide evolution in the E. Coli / ampicillin example, but that we always observe the same outcome for that experiment. My question is, if God guides evolution, why does he only do it when we aren't setting up experiments to see what happens under a given set of circumstances? That sort of selectivity seems rather deceptive. It is the same as the problem with miracles mysteriously ceasing as soon as humans learned how to do science -- God supposedly can do miracles, but anytime we are watching in a rigorous way, he lets things proceed in an orderly fashion, as though he isn't there.
The appeal of theistic evolution is that it supposedly doesn't require God to be deceptive in the face of scientific evidence the way normal creationism does. My point is that theistic evolution doesn't actually seem to get around the deception problem.
Now, it is certainly possible that an omnipotent being *could* manipulate the universe only when we aren't looking. That might be deceptive, but if an omnipotent being wanted to be deceptive that wouldn't, by itself, bother me. What I find troubling is when the same being supposedly demands we believe in it and intends to treat us differently based on whether or not we do. I figure that is the viewpoint of god that is typically held by theistic evolutionists, because if evolution is capable of producing complex life on its own, why else feel the extra supernatural layer is required?
What I think is hilarious is that I've never, not once, heard anyone actually say that "six days" was exact
Good for you. But I've met plenty of fundamentalists with that view. They're typically called "Young Earth Creationists". And they're common -- the linked poll claims that 40% of Americans believe that the Earth is less than 10K years old. It was the basis of the Scopes Trial, and has been in an issue in a number of court decisions since then. This is very much an ongoing issue.
It is very wrong to say the earth is flat. There are many, many ways of demonstrating its wrongness and assuming the earth is flat will lead you to wildly incorrect conclusions for many problems.
Even that isn't that wrong. The earth being flat is actually a very good model for the overwhelming majority of human day-to-day activities. I can't think of a single instance where my personal actions have been directed by anything but a flat earth model.
That's of course not to say that I don't depend on satellites, have flown in aircraft that used great circle navigation etc. etc. but on a personal level, I can't think of a single instance where my actions would have been different given the flat earth model and another one.
Stefan Axelsson
It seems to me that this pre-supposes a particular type of God and/or particular limitations on science.
I think if God did (and even more clearly if it continues to) interact with the world then science should certainly (though the necessary tools may not currently exist) be able to address particular questions about God relating to that interaction.
I do not see any fundamental reason why science should not be able to address anything that happens in reality and as such God would only be unaddressable if it took no real action.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
and these "creationists" have a real disrespect for their creator if the devil is the one controlling all the details of creation.
Not my original quote,
Why is Snark Required?
inb4 anyone mentions Creationism.
That's nothing... you were even nb4 anyone claimed "first post".
I didn't claim it because I'd already done that, back in '98 or '99, and gotten it out of my system.
'course that +1, Funny I was aiming for seems to be eluding me, and the humorous responses I'd anticipated are conspicuous by their absence as well.
Gave coldwetdog a nice springboard, though.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
It is very wrong to say the earth is flat. There are many, many ways of demonstrating its wrongness and assuming the earth is flat will lead you to wildly incorrect conclusions for many problems.
Even that isn't that wrong. The earth being flat is actually a very good model for the overwhelming majority of human day-to-day activities. I can't think of a single instance where my personal actions have been directed by anything but a flat earth model.
That's of course not to say that I don't depend on satellites, have flown in aircraft that used great circle navigation etc. etc. but on a personal level, I can't think of a single instance where my actions would have been different given the flat earth model and another one.
When they built the arch in St. Louis back in the '60s, they started from the two bases and built up to meet in the middle. The bases were far enough apart and the height great enough that they had to allow for the curvature of the earth. In other words, a plumb line over one base was not parallel to one over the other.
So, if you were an engineer on a project of that scale, you might need to consider the "not quite flat" Earth model.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Let's say...
Let's say a giant bird had indigestion and threw up a planet-sized rock from it's gizzard! It then took a crap on the planet, making it ready for life. The bird took a seed from a neighboring planet and dropped it in its own dung and then flapped it's wings causing a tachyon inversion that sped up time 1,000,000,000-fold and caused the plant to evolve into the plants, creatures, and people we know today.
Wow! Anyone can play this game and this "theory" sounds just as likely!
You forgot to re-modulate the warp coils and reverse polarity on the thrusters.
Or maybe it was the other way around.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Yeah, this also makes it far more clear how the concepts of eternity or God being all knowing could make sense. If you could see time as we see things in three dimensions, then it becomes trivial to see the "future". A lot of the Bible makes far more sense if you assume that God isn't bound by time. (And really, I don't think it is much of an assumption to make.)
Well, if He exists outside of the universe, then it's no stretch to accept that He exists outside of time as well, since that whole spacetime thing means that time, like space, is a part of the universe, and they only exist because each other does, or something like that.
I just wonder if that doesn't mean that we're basically His 6th grade science project.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Verizon sneaks in a new charge, they see who complains. If no one they leave it, if people do they remove or reduce it.
This process is repeated as often as possible.
Cellular complexity is the result
I really could have used having this appended to my original post* (the first one, as it happens) before I got hit with all the off-topic mods.
*http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2611690&cid=38639404
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I'll bet your sister's preacher wears a necktie. Inform her that a Christian told you to tell her that the necktie is the symbol of wealth and power, and her pastor is a wolf in sheep's clothing. She should find a different church, preferably a nondenominational one.
Free Martian Whores!
Oh, it's still not a bad model for many reasonably simple actions. But it's an easy limitation to run in to, and it's also easy to notice. For example, objects disappear over the horizon differently between flat and curved surfaces. It's also why there are different time zones.
You are entirely correct that athiesm isn't a religion, although there are an awful lot of evangelical athiests. However, my hobby is indeed not collecting baseball cards, and I will ridicule anyone who dares profess a belief in baseball card collecting as an acceptable hobby!
Free Martian Whores!
The Darmok problem occurs far more often than not.
Entirely true. When I was stationed in Thailand in the Air Force in my youth, cultural differences still got in the way of communication even after I learned Thai and was speaking with a Thai person. The Darmok problem almost got me shot once! Let me tell you, someone sticking a gun in your face is a little unpleasant.
Free Martian Whores!
What is political about taking the piss out of people who are afraid to face up to the inevitable reality of their death? And who (largely) live in a foreign country? Egging on Creationists to slaver and scream and soil themselves in their cages is just a permissible blood sport. It's on about the same level of "fun" as pulling the wings off flies, but does have the moral defence that they do, repeatedly, ask for it.
Nah, Nature Blog people - go for it! Put the stick in the bucket, rattle it, watch them come running!
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
linked poll claims that 40% of Americans believe that the Earth is less than 10K years old.
Jesus, that's pathetic if true. Of course, half the population has lower than median intelligence, so it shouldn't be too surprising. The wolves in sheep's clothing find these poor folks easy pickings. It's a shame.
Free Martian Whores!
That's an interesting example. Reading up on it (and bridges) it's not a very big difference, but it's there.
I still get away though, as I said my personal actions, and even though I'm an engineer, I'm not a civil engineer. The largest thing I've designed (playing a mechanical engineer at work) would fit comfortably in your trunk. So even though the holes didn't line up in the end, I can't blame the curvature of the earth. :-)
Stefan Axelsson
Yes, I'm not saying the earth is flat. If you want to explain time zones then a spherical earth comes in handy, but if you just want to live with them a ribbon or better yet route memorisation does just as well (as they don't follow geometry anyway, too much politics involved). China even does without, and they still start school at 8.00 whether that's in the middle of the night or close to lunch. So you don't strictly need them. :-)
So, I'm not sure about "easy to notice" or "run into". As Asimov said, even "flat earth" is a model itself. If you look at the earth, it's patently not flat in most places (barring Bonneville salt flats and places like that). The ancients looked at the undulating land and said, "I wonder if on average it doesn't flatten out."
We could live for a good many thousand years and develop some pretty sophisticated technology without having to question that assumption (hell, even when we got around to thinking round instead of flat, we could then convince ourselves that the rest of the solar system revolved around us instead of a more useful model.
Stefan Axelsson
Even more direct, Jesus said he would come again "soon". I'm pretty sure that rules out the idea of our idea of time being anything like what God considers time so I have no idea why someone would insist it MUST be 6 24 hour days.
Why would Jesus, communicating with human beings, begin speaking in "god terms" just to confuse things? You would think that the son of/manifestation of god would have the sense to know his audience when choosing his words.
Can you provide other examples from the Jesus story where he spoke in terms that would be applicable differently depending on whether he was deemed to be speaking as a "god" vs as a "man", and where he clearly meant them as in "god" mode?
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
It's not really all that confusing to the people he was speaking to. Their scriptures that they had at the time already spoke that way. I am not sure off the top of my head if there are other cases that use similar timescale, but for that matter I can't think of many situations in general where a timescale is given.
Either way, it's a bit off topic to the original discussion which was that the term day as used in Genesis doesn't give any strong reason to suspect that it was 24 hours. If Jesus in fact had intended that his second coming was soon in a literal sense, then it didn't happen and the entire argument is meaningless. If he meant a larger time scale, then the argument that a day or age in Hebrew isn't neccessarily 24 hours is valid and the assumption that the Bible says the world was created in 6, 24 hour days is still not strongly supported.
AJ Henderson
That's because there isn't anything to "know" about Creationism. It's a made-up hypothesis trying to kludge Biblical stories into pseudo-science and has no evidence for it except for supposed arguments "against" evolution, every single one of which has been shown to be false or erroneous. Post some positive evidence that Jesus created something. And make sure that it's unambiguously Jesus and not Thor. Or the FSM. We're waiting.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
by adding addition ring, system doesn't become Irreducible Complex. Many people do not understand meaning of IC. And experiment shows nothing new. One more ring! So what? I can show human with two heads, Fruit fly with four wings...
The computer you typed this comment onto would probably have something to say regarding the intrinsic value of science. At least, if it were sentient and could speak. :P
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
It is stupid (even more so than usual) to use a car analogy as a car was designed.
It seems to be that there are two main problems with "Irreducible Complexity".
Firstly it seems difficult to prove irreducibility, ie to prove the organism isn't viable in a simpler form under all conditions.
Secondly it assumes all evolution involves increased complexity. An irreducibly complex organism could have evolved from a more complex organism that itself evolved "up" from organisms that weren't irreducible. A reasonable analogy here might be an archway. Man made archways are designed and constructed. An ignoramus might conclude therefore that natural arches must me a sign of intelligent design. Of course we know that natural arches weren't built up, they were etched away from something bigger.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
The computer might be more concerned with engineering than science... science isn't all that useful at making things that actually work.
That's one of the best posts I've ever read on slashdot. Thank you for putting the effort into a thoughtful reply!
It does bother me a bit that Nature (the journal, not the mom) is continuing to take a very politically polarized editorial stance. They're really egging on the creationists (pun intended, I guess).
The result, they say, is a challenge to proponents of intelligent design who maintain that complex biological systems can only have been created by a divine force.
And to intelligent-design proponents, Thornton adds, the results say that “complexity can appear through a very simple stepwise process — there is no supernatural process required to create them.”
I think I am missing something in the reading. I hear that ID (Intelligent Design) proponents want biology classes to teach their beliefs, specifically that cells are too complex to have evolved in a stepwise fashion and that evolution is "just a theory" (kind of like gravity is "just a theory", using the colloquial definition of theory that means guess rather than the scientific definition of theory which is a hypothesis that makes a prediction and has not been proven false yet through many, many, many repeated tests throughout many, many, many independent laboratories). The comments I read are a direct addressing to their statements.
In other words, if someone says "thunder and lightening are only the direct product of the gods fighting and forging in their realm in the clouds," then you are not egging them on when you recreate lightning in a laboratory and say "gee, then either I am a god or your hypothesis has been proven false."
ID proponents argue that complexity can only exist due to a powerful creator. They don't say "God" directly, because they lost that court battle - and I have yet to see any on them say we were created by visiting aliens. The scientists stated that they produced it in their lab by allowing natural processes to occur. Two obvious choices bubble up to the top: 1) you state the hypothesis has been falsified in part (again), and thus cast serious doubt on its scientific validity OR 2) the scientists are actually powerful creators that willed the protein into existence by the mere power of their divine or beyond-human nature, in which case we should probably seriously consider worshiping them as Creators lest they unmake us. There are other possibilities, but these are the two big ones that come to mind.
A book high on my next to read list is "Doubt is their Product" by David Michaels. Doubt has been sold to the American public many times - with lead based products (paints, gasoline, etc), synthetic hormones (DES - used with postmenopausal women, pregnant women, in chickens, and beef because "animal tests do not equate to humans" and industry science with no controls and conducted in improper ways outweighed the significant amount of existing non-industry research at the time; BPA), chemical additives (like in microwave popcorn), with tobacco products, with anthropogenic climate change (how can anyone think the amount of vegetation we have clear cut didn't impact our climate in some shape, form, or manner, but can see how a forest fire does?), and even with evolution. There does not need to be contention in the field - all you need to do is hire some industry scientists to say what you want, then push those results out on the public media and say "see, there is a controversy over the issue." People in the US don't care, they believe what they see and read in popular media. This is a tried and true tactic used by industry for quite some time - sell doubt where there is none. Unfortunately, scientists make poor speakers and so many in the US make their decisions based on "the Bible says so, and it says in the Bible that it is the word of God so it must be true" - so whenever a scientist responds to an accusation made by ID and creationism they are "attacking religion", but when religion makes statements that refute generations of scientific research they are merely "stating their beliefs and asking f